A Great Injustice

George Smith, a member of the Empire Club of St. Louis, Mo., writes as follows, under date of Sept. 25 [1874]:

Your article in this week's Clipper about the Empires being ungentlemanly at Louisville does the Empires great injustice.  They wanted the game played out, and it could have been, as it was only 6 o'clock when the umpire called the game.  The Eagles played their half of the ninth inning, making two runs.  The Empires then pitched in and made three runs, tieing the game, 16 to 16, with no man out on the Empire side, and one of the best batters (Wirth) the Empires have at the bat.  The Empires went to Louisville twice this season, and the Eagles have not returned the visit.  I was on the grounds, and saw nothing done whatever by the Empires that gentlemen would not do.  The Empires, being the visiting club, handed a dead ball to play with, which the Eagles objected to, as they said they were nt used to a dead ball, and the umpire, Capt. Seward, allowed them to furnish the ball, a live one.

-Mears Baseball Scrapbook, Volume 4, 1856-1907

September 27, 1874

Games at St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 27: Empire vs. Red Stockings, 19 to 9; Essex vs. Olympic, 20 to 16; Rover vs. Little Eagle, 41 to 15; Jackson vs. Silver Star, 32 to 11; Haymakers vs. Rapids, 25 to 7; Cows vs. Calves, 30 to 28; Alma vs. Granger, 9 to 0; Una vs. Currier, 9 to 0; Atlantic vs. Imperial, 31 to 27...

-Mears Baseball Scrapbook, Volume 4, 1856-1907


This must have been an interesting day of baseball in St. Louis, highlighted by the championship game between the Empires and the Reds. 

Let A Club Be Started At Once.

The admirers of the game in St. Louis, Mo., are talking about getting up a reliable baseball ten to represent St. Louis in the contest for the professional pennant of 1874.  They do not relish the idea of Chicago having a club and getting a chance of winning the championship, while St. Louis has to look on without participating in the fight.  A well-managed professional ten in St. Louis would not only pas as a stock investment, but it would greatly add to the interest of the game in that section of the country.  We hope the St. Louis gentlemen will not allow Chicago to be the only representative in the arena from the West next season.  Ten fine players could be had at very moderate salaries now.  Let a club be started at once. 

-Mears Baseball Scrapbook, Volume 4, 1856-1907


This seems to come from the Clipper of January 3, 1874, and it's the first time I've ever heard of the idea of putting a St. Louis Club in the NA for the 1874 season.  It's significant that people in St. Louis were talking about putting together a professional St. Louis team in 1874 (and, most likely, going back to the late fall of 1873) prior to the events of the 1874 season.  Certainly, this doesn't change the fact that the loses St. Louis clubs suffered at the the hands of Chicago in 1874 was a motivating factor in the formation of the Brown Stockings but it's extremely interesting that there was talk about a professional club well prior to that.     

The Reds, Of Course, Were Not Allowed To Score A Run

On April 28 the amateur Red Stocking Club of St. Louis, called so in compliment to the Boston champions, met the professional White Stocking nine.  The players of the St. Louis "Reds" are lithe and active youngsters, who go in for fielding skill in preference to heavy hitting, and on this special occasion they gave the Chicago professionals about as close a fight as they are likely to have in their championship battles in the professional arena.  The contest up to the close of the fifth inning was marked by one of the prettiest displays of fielding ever seen in St. Louis, neither side scoring a single run.  In the sixth inning, owing to a wild throw of Redmond's, the Chicagos escaped a blank, and before the inning closed they had credited themselves with four runs, not one of which was earned.  In the seventh and eighth innings the "Reds" again "whitewashed" the "Whites," and it was only in the last inning that the Chicago nine even came near earning a run, errors giving them two more, which made their total 5.  The "Reds," of course, were not allowed to score a run.  The game was witnessed by a numerous assemblage of spectators, and the result of the game, so different from that anticipated, will have a tendency to give a new interest to the national pastime in St. Louis.

-Mears Baseball Scrapbook, Volume 2, 1870-1877


I'm always entertained, for some reason, by the whipping the Chicagos gave to the St. Louis clubs in 1874.  They went through the best that St. Louis had to offer like a knife through butter, like Sherman marching through the South, like something something through a goose.  And it's an important moment in the history of St. Louis baseball.  When the Chicagos got through chewing bubble gum and kicking butt, the baseball fraternity in St. Louis realized that it was time to put together a serious professional club, leading to the birth of the Brown Stockings.

The Empire Club Probably Had A Good Laugh About This

At a match game of base ball played yesterday at the Base-ball park between the Union Base ball club and the Missouri gymnasium nine, the latter were victorious by a score of 24 to 15.

St. Louis Republican, June 7, 1874


This is actually rather interesting.  The Union Club had essentially disbanded their baseball club after the 1870 season and there were attempts over the next few years to put a nine back in the field.  For the most part, however, these attempts failed and the Union Club was never able to put a high level team together again.  This 1874 match shows that the club was still trying to put a team together and the results of the match shows that they were not having much success with it.

In all reality, this was not the "Union Club" of the amateur era but just a nine thrown together by the Union Club, which was still operating as a social club in 1874.